Tracing Rob Zombie's Decade Spent Doing the Devil's Work: 'The Lords of Salem'

Today sees the limited release of Rob Zombie‘s The Lords of Salem, which means we’ve reached part five of this five-part retrospective which began with Zombie’s 2003 feature House of 1000 Corpses. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look back at Zombie’s career as much as I enjoyed interviewing him and writing about it. If you haven’t already, please give the previous installments in this series a look, I’ve included all the links at the bottom of this final post.

The Lords of Salem

Zombie’s newest film is The Lords of Salem, an exceedingly moody slice of psychedelic blasphemy. Never one to make the same film twice, Zombie’s latest opus represents an evolution toward more cerebral, yet equally visceral scares. Relying less on hulking or twisted degenerates to deliver the shocks, Lords has a decidedly feminine bent to its particular brand of creeping menace. It also is his first film to profoundly explore spiritual and supernatural themes.

I found this to be easily your scariest film. It has a lot of sadness in it as well. What led to this and why do you suppose establishing an unsettling mood became the focus?

Rob Zombie (RZ): I wanted to do something different. The four films we’ve discussed so far have all gone down the road of physical violence attacking people. It’s literally one person attacking another with a knife or a gun and I wanted to get away from that. Lords of Salem became more of a psychological, mind-fuck film right from the start.

The lead character Heidi Hawthorne [played by Sherri Moon Zombie] is a very sad, lonely person recovering from a lot of issues. Even though her public persona on the radio is very funny and flirty and she jokes around, the reality of her life is not that. I didn’t want to see her cowering in the corner, screaming her head off because witches are attacking her. I thought, maybe it’s just her descent into madness and it’s all just happening around her. But in a weird way, I almost sided with the witches. They love her so much they worship her, but in worshiping her, they destroy her. Plus, the town of Salem at the time of the year we were there was grey, cold and rainy every second of the day and I got a heavy vibe the whole time. The movie took on a very depressing vibe that I really liked and wanted to keep pushing.

Wayne Toth (Zombie’s longtime Makeup FX collaborator) really upped his game with some startlingly unique concepts as far as the creature makeup is concerned (see photo above). What sort of brainstorming sessions did the two of you have to come up with such bizarre and grotesque creations?

RZ: Me and Wayne started working on the film before anyone else got involved. I knew that on a low budget, short schedule, film Wayne needed to get a jump start. Things like the little midget guy or Satan or the squiggly creature, we knew the basic premise of. Her giving birth to Satan’s child, that’s hardly a new idea, but that didn’t matter to me because the way that we do it is what matters.

We took the basic ideas and were always trying to figure out how to do the exact opposite of what anyone would expect. Wayne did a great job, I love working with Wayne. Lords of Salem came out of the fact that Wayne reminded me of it. I had forgotten about the script and Wayne said, “What about Lords Of Salem? Let’s do that”.

I loved the Count Gorgann character and his band’s video! Being something of a black metal enthusiast, I have to ask. Is he based on Varg Vikernes’ Count Grishnack in any way? Did that violent music scene from the early to mid-’90s with its Church burning and murders have any influence on the film?

RZ: Not so much. Early, early on, there was this idea there was a band called The Lords of Salem and they were causing some problems, but I ended up taking that out of the script. I like black metal and a lot of the Norwegian stuff because it’s so extreme and insane, especially the early stuff like Darkthrone or Mayhem. It’s so raw and crazy. I thought, I’ll throw that in there, just as a distraction. It has nothing to do with what’s going on, but it’s so ridiculous and I like the idea that this guy comes in and he’s so serious spouting this satanic rhetoric and they just make fun of him. He reappears at the end of the movie because everything that ever entered Heidi’s mind is sort of being ripped apart, so he’s in it.

I like making a big deal out of things then having them be small. Form a band, make an entire song, make an entire music video, even if we only have like two seconds of it in the movie. That helps the living and breathing process of it. We have a video, we’re going to release it soon. It helps me, it helps everybody, it helps the world to feel real.

This film features Sherri Moon Zombie‘s best work in my opinion as Heidi Hawthorne. Her friendship with Herman Whitey Salvador played by Jeffrey Daniel Phillips feels entirely real and lived in. It’s rare to get a sense that people are genuinely friends in films and not just characters reciting lines to each other. How do you go about creating that reality with your actors?

RZ: I’m glad that came through for you, because you always see these groups of friends and it seems like they don’t even know each other’s names. I had Sherri, Ken [Foree, of Dawn of the Dead fame] and Jeff get together a lot to rehearse the radio scenes because I felt it would be important it felt they had some rapport on the radio. You couldn’t just have them go in day one and have them read lines, it would have been awkward. That went on for a long time. During that, Ken had some family issues, so he wasn’t around that much. So Sherri and Jeff got to spend a lot of time together and got to know each other well. Their off screen friendship came across onscreen. It was in the script somewhat originally, but as it developed, I began to rewrite the script a little to take advantage of it. My favorite scene of the whole movie is when they have that final phone call together. Even though it’s “a horror movie” and we’re not supposed to care about any of this shit, I like that late in a film like this, you can still settle down and have a personal conversation between two characters and it matters. Because if it doesn’t matter, who cares?

No one makes horror films like Rob Zombie does. Whether or not you enjoy his style and approach is a matter of personal taste, as it is with all bold and visceral filmmakers. He doesn’t pander to expectation and he doesn’t make concessions for the masses. Zombie upsets the apple cart with every film he creates, and that’s what the genre needs above all else.

Someone willing to suffer the slings and arrows of critical lambasting and fan discontent in the service of pursuing an authentic vision. Speaking as a fan of his and a lifelong devotee of the horror genre, I can’t wait to see what he does next.